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Eye Land Beginning in Mclean park. He, real estate agent, the city's first mayor, stamps his name on thick green blades of grass/ open space. Once people said park and thought of a pond, a sheep-fold, a manor-house wood for deer hunts, a net trapping fish at low tide. Then cities came to have small islands of grass/ trees/ a pool, where everyone could go. Birds. Raccoons. Coyotes. Worms. Ants. Bees. Nomadic snakes. People tossing balls to dogs. Children on swings. People spreading blankets, lying face up to the sky's abyss. People smoking crack. Doing tai chi. Eating, talking, dreaming. Holding together islands of common. For rambling eyes, the organs of sight, play Bach. Rambling past Benny's closed-Sunday store. Spear-top grates pulled shut. Locked. Past a house draped with bamboo mats against the sun. Another house crowded on sidewalk, people chattering through its walls. Busy land-developer Prior street heading on to the viaduct freeway to downtown – such is the furnace tubing of nested humans. Corner of Main and Prior, old bank building developer calls Left Bank, for restaurant with seven floors of condos. Metal U-lock fence around dug-out gravel. Grey stone bank with its de rigueur columns. Then American Hotel with its dealers, hanging out back on pot-holed Station Street. Adega Portuguese restaurant and the Ivanhoe with backpackers' rooms. For Robin Hood, Friar Tuck and Richard the Lion-heart per chance. Across from City Gate Towers locked inner courts. Eye's asleep in urban dreams. Cannot wake. Looking at brick/ concrete/ glass. Cannot think other than towers/ courtyards/ sidewalks. Not alder/ cottonwood/ fir/ thimbleberry/ salmonberry/ bracken up the mountain. Cannot think tangled, not square like simple modern brick where saplings grow in sidewalk grates. Cross Quebec Street to Science World's geodesic globe – white scaffolding holding shiny metallic hexagons holding shiny metallic triangles. Not far from Carpet World. Kitchen World. Chocolate World. Furniture World. Today Science World's operated by Nintendo. A truck with purple thorax and bulging bug-eyes, 30 boys milling about trying out games in raunchy ratcheting music. To be scientists in labcoats, boil monsters in test tubes, fly to Mars, invent robots for doing homework. Eye, a word mime, struggling to wake from mimesis, carries on to Granville Island. Passing giant stumps of first trees on Science World lawn. Human forms hold fish enfolded in trunk sinews. Spirits of dead forest, label says. Spirit of Cy Belfry says False Creek ferry boat. Spirit of George McInnis says another. Spirit brands. No-name spirits, too, ply the inlet. To Plaza of Nations, Stamp's Landing. Yaletown. Granville Island. Push off with little loads in rub-a-dub tubs. Ocean barge towering overhead: The Pauqachin. And the Haida Chieftain, rusty hull and funnels, rubber-tires ramming the barge to shore. Anchor lines of yachts. Sleek sailors. Funky live-aboards with shanty huts painted red/ yellow/ blue. Eye's asleep again in sea-drift chugging slowly to Yaletown, shrunk to a pippin in paper high-rises of architect's clean curving sea-walls. No hint of weed or fish death. Eye's the driftwood. Drift-words. The ferryman – a summer-job lad – radios home base: Sam'll pick up your boat and that means we're closer to a beer. Hey, aren't we going to Stamp's Landing, a passenger yells. NO WAKE say big letters on barnacled piling. Everywhere little rub-a-dubs weave through anchored yachts. Curling round the shore of Granville Island. Sandbar left by glaciers. Let's go there for a drink. Squamish fishing ground from time immemorial with vine-maple hurdles and fine nets woven of stinging nettle. 1916 filled in for Yukan Ironworks/ British Ropes/ Morrison Steel/ Canadian Chain Co. Houseboats' strangely flimsy glass skins float on their floors. No fear of global warming for them. Cranes/ conveyor belts/ concrete silos of Ocean Cement looming. How much can humans pile up – maybe a whole Pacific of burnt limestone. Rub-a-dub docks at the food market's blueberries blackberries, raspberries, cherries, tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, mushrooms, fish, flowers, pork chops, steaks, chickens. The big copper bowl and marble slabs of the fudge-maker. Bach organ playing fugues. The fishmonger wraps up $20-slice of fish-middle, alive and swimming yesterday in Queen Charlotte Islands. Back to ferry dock for Number 2 boat, not the spirit of anything. Quebecois tourists spot a launch maybe owned by a chocolate company: Aprés Huit. Cette bateau la – ça, c'est Aprés Huit. Lots of laughter. Ça, c'est Plaza of Nations. Ça, c'est Science World. Nintendo truck still there. Crowd of boys even bigger. Speaking into microphone. Calling out names of winners. In science-world, a place for making boys who'll buy Nintendo (can it be free of that?). Eye crosses to east side of Quebec Street, sees passage to inner courtyard of City Gate Towers. Maybe no exit. Follows concrete walls, shrubs, steel fences, surprising two security guards sunning themselves. Turns north, through a gate. Sign: for City Gate Residents only. No dogs. No gods. Is gate locked at the end of promenade. Gate is open, the rusted catch smashed in. By Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. |